Businesses are under increasing competitive pressure to develop applications that are faster to build and deploy. The applications must be flexible to meet the demands of the ever changing business processes and must control operation and management costs. Business competitiveness is achieved through a coordinated movement of the entire business—designing, buying, selling, planning and servicing. There is no single application or system that provides all the business functions in a manner customized for the business. Individual business functions, however, are typically provided by custom or packaged applications in a siloed manner. It is a challenge to compose existing applications into cohesive, collaborative, self-service, and customized applications.
Current application platforms have not evolved to provide a uniform platform across technologies and tiers or to supporting the end-to-end life cycle of service compositions. Current platforms are generally single nodes that host individual application components in silos. Current applications must develop, deploy, and manage the application silos and the middleware infrastructure across different tiers. A lack of cohesion across the composition of application components, and the disconnected management across different application and infrastructure services, makes it difficult to adopt middleware technologies for building composite applications. In addition, there is currently no end-to-end application model/definition. The definition and the boundaries of applications are in minds of application developers and application administrators. The lack of a comprehensive application definition and runtime support make application administration—e.g. application deployment and management—complex and expensive. Application administration is further impacted by technology shifts such as cloud computing. For example, the advent of cloud technology makes composite applications even more distributed and loosely-coupled leading to increasingly complex application management.